Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Publication: Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins





I will be contributing a book chapter entitled 'Towards an Emergent Knowledge of the Margins' to the forthcoming publication, Emerging Landscapes. Drawing on my experience of involvement in the recent art project, Urban Retreat (2010), in this chapter I explore the specificity of the marginal landscape as a space of emergence or even emergency, an uncertain or indeterminate territory always at the cusp of being redrawn or re-conceptualized through the prism of both representation and production. Reflecting on specific aspects of the project, Urban Retreat, I explore how the inhabitation of margins requires the development of creative tactics, a ‘productive knowledge’ necessary for operating critically within their unstable terms. This chapter reflects on what can be gleaned from the experiential encounter with a particular marginal place, examining how such tactics might constitute the basis of a manual for living a life in marginal times.

Emerging Landscapes Publication
At a time of environmental crisis, shifting geopolitical boundaries, and economic downturn, Emerging Landscapes ponders the state of landscape and its future, mapping those practices that creatively address the boundaries between possibility, opportunity and action in imagining and shaping our world. Drawing on the productive synergies that emerged from the recent Emerging Landscapes conference, this publication seeks to discuss the potential and limits of landscape studies as a cross-disciplinary field of research.